Very impressive... Every single driver release has brought the 7970 much closer to to the 680 and it seems Nvidia has never released a driver to help keep that gap wide and now AMD took the crow. It is hard to imagine how the 7970 went from being so far behind the 680 and now the GHz edition is a winner. I'm very disappointed at the Nvidia driver team of late :P

Interesting... I was looking at some results for the 7870 and 7770 and the performance gains with the new drivers seem pretty tame compared to the impact on the 7970. Got an explanation why the 7970 will benefit so much more than these lower siblings? Also, I'm curious what % of 7970/680 owners play above 1900x1200 performance as Nvidia still holds on to the performance title at this resolution.

Interesting... I was looking at some results for the 7870 and 7770 and the performance gains with the new drivers seem pretty tame compared to the impact on the 7970. Got an explanation why the 7970 will benefit so much more than these lower siblings? Also, I'm curious what % of 7970/680 owners play above 1900x1200 performance as Nvidia still holds on to the performance title at this resolution.

I hate how the the bars in the chart on the first page make it look like the gains are almost double, then when you look at the scale, its 10% more.
Still, this is great to see. I imagine one of the driver developers was pouring through code when all of a sudden... "holy S$%$ guys, I just realized something..."

Really great news for AMD, and I'm sure it's a welcome change from the doom and gloom we've been hearing from them lately. It'll be interesting to see how the lower end cards stack up and/or Crossfire.

So if my quick check online is any indication the 7970 seems to be $50+ less expensive than a 680? That's a massive gap, and if the results work their way down the line should put some pressure on Nvidia to draw back from their (too expensive IMO) current pricing scheme.

Anyone else think its ironic that these drivers are called "Never settle", while we are then told that their CPUs are "good enough"? ;p

Good to see some extra across the board performance on these. I was following Sky's [email protected] thread there and was thinking something was up if he was working hard to get some new PPD numbers. The news of the extra games to be bundled was not really news, but the driver optimizations were a great surprise.

I hate how the the bars in the chart on the first page make it look like the gains are almost double, then when you look at the scale, its 10% more.
Still, this is great to see. I imagine one of the driver developers was pouring through code when all of a sudden... "holy S$%$ guys, I just realized something..."

What intern disabled all these bits? WTF

Glad to hear its a driver update as I should be receiving my 2nd 7970 here this week.... now I have to go bitch about some games for free.